Bonus Sample: Piker, the Zhongshan Suit, and Left Melancholy

Listen to the full episode There’s a lot going on when Hasan Piker wears a Zhongshan suit and praises Maoism. Matthew uses Wendy Brown's 1999 essay "Resisting Left Melancholy", which cites Walter Benjamin, Freud, and Stuart Hall to argue that campist rhetoric on the left, whether earnest or ironic, can signal unmourned loss more than conviction, and that nostalgic attachments to revolutionary pasts can choke off engagement with present possibility. Brown argues that left melancholy displaces its grief over capital’s triumphs onto scapegoats (identity politics, postmodernism). Matthew adds that it functions as an affective membership fee within online left communities. This might account for why liberals sense that they're sometimes being asked to join in choreographies of sadness rather than build coalitions in the present. Drawing on Hall's account of Thatcher's mastery of political language, and closing with reflections from Matthew's years as a church organist playing nearly 1000 funerals, the episode asks what it would actually mean for the left to mourn its losses instead of reenacting them — and how mourning might be a necessary revolutionary act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices